Middlebury College

Cellphone booths in Davis Library

We were going to wait to announce the new Cellphone booths in Davis Family Library until we’d had a chance to evaluate them and decide on a permanent location for them, but Brittany beat us to the punch with this post on middblog. (Thanks Yiling Zhang for the great picture.)

Photo by Yiling Zhang

We’ve installed these in an attempt to solve two problems. For years we’ve had complaints about people having cell phone conversations adjacent to study areas. Other academic libraries like ours have successfully used cell phone booths like these to solve that problem. Also, there are about thirty staff members working in shared offices in Davis Family Library and these folks don’t have a private place for phone calls to their doctor, baby sitter, etc. Part of the reason we acquired the cell phone booths was to enhance the work/life balance of these staff members.

We purchased them at a deeply discounted price and we hope they’re worth it. Only time will tell. In Brittany’s post she mentioned that the location of the one on the upper level might not be ideal. If you have suggestions of better spots in Davis Family Library for these, please feel free to drop me a line at jwatson@middlebury.edu Thanks!

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Let me add to the conversation by saying that the hope is that we can find good locations for them that do not detract from the beautiful architectural design of our library. One of the comments on Midd Blog suggested that this decision to place these in our library was disrespectful to the designers of the space. Point taken. It is a major challenge to allow a building to adapt to new needs and to new uses and not impinge on the original aesthetic design. That said, we do not want the addition of these to impact the overall aesthetics any more than necessary.